We had just shifted to our new address in my hometown a couple of years back, and the first thing that my wife did was to start looking for a housemaid. She is a working woman with a very stiff schedule and it is quite impossible for her to manage the household without domestic help. After scouring the whole area for a maid she finally struck gold. A woman came one morning and declared that she had been told by another woman that a certain lady was asking around for a maid. She had come to offer her services. After a short round of negotiations, her monthly salary was fixed at Rs.500 a month for one hour per day, six days a week. She started working the very next day.
She hadn’t even worked for seven straight days when all of a sudden she stopped coming. So, my wife and I went looking for in the nearby slum, where, in the middle of a huddle of shanties, our maid’s hut stood like an old ghost. She came out after keeping us waiting for five minutes. But I could instantly make out that something was seriously wrong with her. A face contorted with pain and a distinct lurch told me she was sick.
But obviously the sickness could not be discussed in front of me and my wife gestured me to move out of the small courtyard. After their little discussion, my wife came out and told me what I was suspecting—that our maid was suffering from menstrual hygiene-related complications. She also requested for a leave of four days, which my wife graciously granted and extended to a week. But something unexpected happened after the week passed.
Our maid would always come at 8:00 AM. So when the calling bell rang at 8 one fine morning, we knew we had been saved for the day! But instead of our maid’s lean silhouette, a little girl’s gleaming visage stood at the doorway. “Who are you?”, my the wife asked in surprise. “I am Rimpa. My mother sent me to work here. She cannot come. She is still sick”, we realised instantly that this was our maid’s little daughter. She did bear her mother’s eyes and thick brows. “How old are you?”, I asked.”Eleven”, replied the little girl promptly with a coy smile.
Now, this was a befuddling situation for my wife and me. As we stared at each other’s face trying to make out what the other was thinking, we were at a loss of words. Do we let an eleven-year-old work as domestic help? After a few minutes of deliberation, we decided to let the girl come in for some discussion before we could take a call on the matter.
Who Is A Child According To The Law?
The Indian Constitution is very clear about this. The Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, and the subsequent Amendment Bill of 2016 clearly defines a child as anyone below 14 years of age and employing such a child, even as domestic help, is a serious criminal offence that can land the employer in serious trouble.
The punishment is pretty harsh—up to 2 years behind bars and Rs. 50, 000 in fine; either or both could be levied.
With the prospect of jail-time looming over our heads, we decided to let go of Rimpa after trying to describe to her the pickle we would land ourselves in if we chose to employ her in place of her mother. But her parting words were like shards of glass that stuck deep into our hearts.
“My mother works in seven households. She earns the living for our family. I have another sister who is six. She has not started school yet. I study in the fifth standard in the local free primary school. My father is a drunkard and beats my mother and me often. He used to be a rickshaw puller until he lost his vehicle in a bet. Now he drinks country booze and curses everyone he sees. No one likes him in the bazaar and so no one wants to give him a job in one of the shops. He beats my mother whenever he is out of money for his booze and my mother denies giving him the money.
My mother doesn’t fall sick often. But sometimes she has the woman’s disease and she cannot move due to belly pain. I step in for her in those days. I cannot work in all seven households. I only go to households where there is light work to do. Your house is very clean my mother told me and she also told me that it would be the easiest to work here. You do not scream or shout. I will start going to school once my mother is fit for work. They serve mid-day meal in the school. If I eat there six days a week, some rice and dal can be saved up for the family. “
We silently listened to every word she so desperately tried to put together. Then, as silently as she had come, the girl left for the next household. It was 8:30 AM already and we knew that she was late for her work. We could not hold her back from earning a fistful of rice and dal for her family. She was indeed stepping in boldly as the primary breadwinner for her family. A little flower not even in her teens had understood how this world works. Yet, with immeasurable poetic grace, she hadn’t shuddered; she hadn’t cowered, and certainly hadn’t lost her gleaming smile.
Was I capable of such terrific feat of raw courage? Certainly not! So, the next day we went to meet the mother-daughter duo in their shanty hut, weaving through the stingy alleys of their colony. We weren’t ready to break the law as yet but work around it if you will. We told our housemaid that we were ready to let Rimpa work. But there was a condition—the girl had to bring her school books with her and my wife would tutor her. The only household chore she was to help with was peeling the potatoes and vegetables with the safety peeler. No mopping and no brooming! Payment, of course, would be made to the mother and in full.
“Babu, they make the children mop the school floor every day”, our sick housemaid smiled and remarked right before we left. Quite frankly, we had nothing to say to this. I guess, they buy and sell everything on this planet, even the smiles of little kids. It is no secret that the child labour problem is pretty darn bad in India. There are more children employed in India as child labourers than most countries in the world, and a lion’s share of them in hazardous working conditions.
A sizeable chunk of child labourers makes up for the domestic help sector, and with child molesters and abusers lurking in our midst it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most children employed as domestic help have to go through hell. With stats and data galore in the public domain, some painstaking research and cross-referencing of facts shine the light on utter bestiality. More on this later! But the crux of this whole article isn’t about highlighting numbers. It is more about positing a question to one and all. It is all about a moral conundrum my wife and I were faced with a couple of years ago.
Do, you abide by the law and not employ a child from a downtrodden family, even temporarily, in place of an ailing adult domestic help?
What you consider a meagre sum might, in fact, be a lifesaver for hungry mouths. It is unwise to believe that the poor are open to accepting alms and donations. My housemaid, who is back in form now, refused to receive donations from us the second day we went to meet her after turning down her daughter. I am not a beggar—she retorted. I will only take what I have worked for, and if I cannot go to work, my daughter will do my duties. You can pay me if she works in your house.—she added. What do you say to such a self-respecting woman? She had made her choice of sending her daughter to work in her place.
It was a choice driven by grovelling poverty. But even after so many months of working for us, she has never come across as a lousy and irresponsible mother. Rimpa, the lively little girl, is thirteen now. She goes to school and sometimes helps her mother with her employment. There is a certain gleaming determination in her face reminiscent of her mother’s unwavering self-esteem.